"I thought of the seven years I'd spent with Steve, and how at first when we'd kissed his lips had been a boat made of roses and how now they were a freight train of lead." In her latest collection of short stories, "Willful Creatures," Aimee Bender continually encapsulates emotions and experiences such as soured love. Culled from the pages of today's most high-profile literary magazines such as
McSweeney's
, Tin House and the
Paris Review
(13 of the 15 stories were previously published), these stories share the theme of space -- though the subject matter varies from budding sexuality to keeping a miniature man as a pet -- and meditate on how the characters' surroundings can control them. Bender's stories also range in length and voice, floating in the ethereal space between naturalism and magic realism.

In some of these stories, control is wielded by the characters, while at other times they have absolutely no say. Either way, the individual ultimately must accept the circumstances of life. Perhaps this is why Bender continually returns to magic realism in her storytelling. Because it doesn't matter if you have keys for fingers or raise potato children, if the situation is dealt with by the character honestly enough, it can't help but become real and relevant to the reader.

So when Bender introduces the pumpkinhead couple in "Ironhead," the reader does not balk. Her language gives us space enough to fit ourselves into the stories. When the female pumpkinhead guides her man's "hand up her neck to the inside of her head so he could feel the warmth of the flesh there, how it was growing soft and meaty with time," to show him why she wants a child, the reader empathizes with them. When their child is born with an iron for a head, readers do not doubt the genuine parental love the pumpkinheads have for their baby, who when he cries, "steam sifted up from his shoulders in measured puffs. "

Tearing out of Las Vegas after a fight with her boyfriend, so familiar to her that she could "graph it," the narrator of "Fruit and Words" craves a mango. Reaching an oasis in the desert, she arrives at an abundant fruit stand where the proprietor also crafts words out of everything from food to blood. The nameless narrator appreciates the attempt to make "the world steady somehow" by molding the abstract into concrete objects, but her cynicism trumps the artist's claim that she bottles "hope" by attending weddings in Vegas chapels and waits for the couples to say, "I do." The narrator's doubtful response to the notion proves again Bender's ability to cram so much into so little: "I could just see those couples now, perched at opposite ends of a living-room couch, book-ending the air between them, the thickest, most formed air around, that uncrossable, unbreakable, impossible air, finally signing the papers that would send them to different addresses."

It is not only heartache and pessimism that fills Bender's stories. In one of the book's shortest tales, "The Meeting," a man meets a woman who does "not fit the shape in his brain of the woman he had planned so vigorously and extensively to meet." In his head he continually denies that this woman is for him, and he lets her know, too. She tries to shoo him away, but he still sticks around, though his brain remains busy enumerating everything that is wrong with the woman. He loathes her taste in animals and cannot stand her broad shoulders. A point comes, however, where he stops overthinking. The two are in bed as the sun pours through green curtains, and they do nothing more than watch the day turn to night. The narrator explains it perfectly: "It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened."

Bender makes space matter in every story in "Willful Creatures." The existence of all emotions, from pain to happiness, is what validates life, and Bender spends time with all of it here. We are the spaces these forces fill, and in turn we fill the spaces that shape our day-to-day living. This collection moves along effortlessly, though you will linger in the "what" it reveals.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.